TagFreud

“Today, psychoanalysis has been marginalized and is struggling to survive in a hostile academic and clinical environment. This raises the question as to whether the paradigm is still relevant in psychiatric science and practice.”

This week, we consider the relevance of psychoanalysis.

Drawing from the May issue of The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, we look at two papers.

Freud and analysis: debating his relevance

In a Perspectives piece, Dr. Joel Paris argues that psychoanalysis is part our legacy – but not much more. In an Editorial, Dr. Paula Ravitz responds. She opens by writing: “My concern is that by unnecessarily pitting psychiatry against psychoanalysis, we may throw out the baby with the bathwater.”

Psychiatry has left much of Freudian analysis behind. Is that a good thing? This week’s Reading ponders this question – first, with an excellent essay by The Guardian’s Oliver Burkeman that considers “the revenge of Freud,” then with a response from New York Magazine’s Jesse Singal, and, finally, with a recent paper from The American Journal of Psychiatry comparing patients with bulimia who received psychoanalysis and who received CBT.

A few years ago, a well-known celebrity — let’s call him Mr. Conway — reluctantly brought his twenty-two-year-old daughter to see me. Elena had taken a leave of absence from Yale, Mr. Conway explained, because of issues surrounding a mysterious drop in her grades. Mrs. Conway nodded assent and added that Elena’s slacking off stemmed from “a lack of motivation and low self-confidence.”
In response to their daughter’s perceived troubles, the Conways had hired a parade of motivational experts, life coaches, and tutors. Despite this pricey coterie of handlers, her behavior failed to improve. In fact, one tutor even volunteered (rather hesitantly, given Mr. Conway’s celebrity) that “something is wrong with Elena.” The Conways dismissed the tutor’s concern as an excuse for his own incompetence and continued to look for ways to help their daughter “snap out of her funk.”

They turned to naturopathic agents and meditation, and when those didn’t help, they shelled out more money for hypnosis and acupuncture. In fact, they had done everything possible to avoid seeing a psychiatrist until “the incident.”

So begins Dr. Jeffrey A. Lieberman’s new book, Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry. Written with Ogi Ogas, the volume has just been published by Little, Brown and Company.